Bitcoin prices plunge in the lead up to Christmas

Bitcoin has lost over a third of its value this month

Bitcoin prices plunge in the lead up to Christmas

In late 2017, Bitcoin's growth was seemingly unstoppable, reaching values of over $17,000 at its peak. Since then the bubble has burst, sending the value of the currency into free fall, with the single bitcoins being worth less than $4,000 today.

At the start of this month, Bitcoin was worth over $6,300 and at the time of writing the currency is worth around $3,650, revealing a decrease in value of over 40%. Some analysts expect pricing to decrease further in the leadup to Christmas, though only time will tell if these forecasts will prove accurate.

With cryptocurrency pricing hitting such lows, consumer mining operations remains unprofitable with mainstream GPU hardware, allowing the pricing of gaming-oriented products to normalise. This is great news for PC gamers, as they can now seek value-for-money when upgrading their systems, though it has resulted in weaker than expected financial quarters for all major graphics card manufacturers.

When Bitcoin's value is this low, there is no reason to expect cryptocurrency related GPU demand to increase anytime soon.

From the perspective of PC gamers weak cryptocurrency pricing is a good thing, as it allows PC hardware to sell for their MSRP pricing and encourages hardware manufacturers to bundle their hardware with free games and other promotional goodies, something which is unnecessary during times of high demand. GPU-based cryptocurrency mining setups also have an impact on other areas of the PC market, upping the demand for low-cost processors and DRAM, making decreases in cryptocurrency demand impactful on areas of the custom PC market outside of the graphics space.

Right now it is pretty safe to say that cryptocurrency-related demand will not increase the prices of our PC hardware anytime soon, securing solid component pricing moving into 2019, at least on the GPU-side.

Most Recent Comments

The reason GPU mining is no longer feasible has much more to do with specialised hardware being released that significantly outperforms GPUs at these tasks than anything else. I don't think there's any implication that the price drop in crypto that occurred almost entirely within the last 14 days had any impact on the pricing of GPU hardware, which mostly stabilised a couple of months ago. The increase in mining difficulty and reduction in rewards caused by the "Halving's" and hashing complexity increase are also knock-on effects of specialised hardware(ASICs) hitting the market which made GPUs impossible to attain profit. Of course Bitcoin GPU mining hasn't been feasible for around half a decade or so, so all the GPU use for mining over the last couple of years has been for smaller altcoins like ETH, which had algorithms specifically designed to resist ASIC acceleration. But of course, where there's a will, there's a way, and I think if anything it's shown that the solution to fixing the mining craze's impact on the GPU market is actually the opposite you implied; As ASICs were only feasible to make when ETH and similar were at their peaks and looked like they'd be maintained(Arguably it's also the ASICs that have caused the crash but that's another story). Had crypto prices not risen to such highs, there's a good chance GPUs would still be out of stock everywhere.

Personally having been mining, investing, trading & researching crypto for around 7 or 8 years now I'm more than used to these drops we get consistently every year in the lead up to christmas, compared to last years this ones fairly tame I guess but that's the boom-bust cycle of any commodity(As it has to be treated until it can be used for things like paying taxes really).

Now we have countries like my homeland of Malta adopting blockchain for use in almost every aspect of government to revolutionise welfare, healthcare, public services and so on due to it's security & economic benefits over paper or traditional digital forms of information storage & logging, as well as states starting to allow crypto for paying taxes & the likes while many more look to adoption of nationised fiat currency, I wouldn't bet on the whole crypto market cap remaining so low, it just might take some new technologies to play through to reignite it.Quote

The point that I was getting at here is that further decreased to the value of cryptocurrency pricing will make the resurgence of GPU mining less likely in the near-mid term future.

Yes, I am aware that dedicated ASICs are upping the difficulty of cryptocurrency mining, but higher difficulties and lower pricing pretty much accomplish the same thing. Both make mining less profitable, either by giving out fewer coins for the same work or by devaluing the coins themselves.

By "good for PC gamers" I mean that we shouldn't expect a mining spike in the near future, or a return to the horrid cryptocurrency inflated pricing of late 2017/early 2018.Quote

I see what you mean I just don't think a resurgence in anything but the most immature of altcoins would or could have any impact on GPU sales at all. Coins like ETH are moving away from Proof-of-work algorithms entirely so the idea of using hashing to confirm transactions(And therefore large amounts of computational power) is expected to become antiquated as the technology around cryptocurrency matures over the next year.

Most big miners don't pay a whole lot of attention to the current price of a coin because they consider it a long term investment. Many will only cash in what they need to cover the hardware costs.

Generally, BTC prices bottom out after being negative for 6-12 months and shortly after a Halving before rising to far beyond the previous peak, this cycle's continued throughout its history recursively and generally following the same ramp up pattern.https://248qms3nhmvl15d4ne1i4pxl-wpe...11/body3-1.png

I certainly wouldn't rule out a bull-run leading into 2019(A sharp drop in prices can trigger a much sharper rise if it hits a buy-wall), but now we've got ASICs hitting 7nm alongside GPUs I doubt it'd mean a whole lot for gamers.Quote

you've been 7 or 8 years in contact with crypto, but you actually have NO IDEA what you are talking about.

FACTS:

- more than 78.000Gh/s have left the ETH pool at this time. The amount of hash power that has left all the other coins, is huge. Why? Because at current prices, only people with Electricity costs of about 0,04cnt$/kW can get little profit. And those with free electricity still get profit.

- This situation has NEVER EVER HAPPENED BEFORE. In the past, no banks, or governments, laws, legislations or taxes were implemented against crypto. This is why your view is absolute rubish. You think that this is a cycle, and that over and over again people will dump and pump the coin in a speculation movement. Reality is this movement is no longuer possible, because investors don't know the future that laws will force to follow.

- In the past, after every pump, there was a dump. And this was true only for BTC, because all the other coins didn't suffer not a 100th of that, because the capitalization of those coins was mostly not exceding 1 million dollars.

- Cryptos have failed miserably in the objective they said.

a) anonimity is already dead. Banks and governments are creating laws to control as much as they can this market, so you cannot stay unknown for too long. they will catch you eventually (thing that did not happen in the past).

b) end of decentralization: mining and control of coins is in very few hands. Chinese people control 50% or more of the production of BTC due to low electricity bills.

c) BTC is not being recognized as a way to bypass the current state of money, and almost nothing you can buy with cryptos.

d) and even in you consider the technology behind cryptos, ALMOST ALL ENTERPRISES ARE CONSTRUCTING AND DESIGNING THEIR OWN COINS. So current technology may die in a short period of time.

e) cryptos could not even accomplish the idea of fast transactions, and this is why all around the world crypto is losing more and more support day after day.

- Also consider the fact that cryptos suffer from a lot of hacking activities, and that the security involving wallets is far from mature.

- Add to that the huge losses among all investors due to huge brutal volatility.

The current situation HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. And those that will apply this simple BUT FALSE PRINCIPLE that everything is a cycle, SHOULD GET REKT.Quote

a) anonimity is already dead. Banks and governments are creating laws to control as much as they can this market, so you cannot stay unknown for too long. they will catch you eventually (thing that did not happen in the past).

Anonymity was never a goal or function of Bitcoin or most other cryptocurrencies, the blockchain concept that underpins the whole cryptocurrency concept is literally a massive public ledger of everything that happens on the network which everyone with a full wallet/ has on their computer. Anonymity could only be implemented through "Tumbling", a technology created & enabled by various (Often anonymous) third parties, and even then it can technically never enable true anonymity, and using these platforms creates various trust issues and risks in itself and is never really endorsed. The idea that Bitcoins intention was to create a massive money laundering service is ludicrous.

Quote:

- This situation has NEVER EVER HAPPENED BEFORE. In the past, no banks, or governments, laws, legislations or taxes were implemented against crypto. This is why your view is absolute rubish. You think that this is a cycle, and that over and over again people will dump and pump the coin in a speculation movement. Reality is this movement is no longuer possible, because investors don't know the future that laws will force to follow.

Sorry but this is blatantly false. Bitcoin has long been attacked by governments & regulatory bodies. BTC & LTC's first joint spike was primarily caused by Chinese & Indian people buying it to subvert the limits imposed on their ability to store their wealth in other commodities as opposed to their fiat, then the respective governments reacted and the price reacted with it. For all intents and purposes cryptocurrencies have only just gained acceptance in governments, with the UK, Russia, and many smaller nations all investing & researching heavily into being leaders in the cryptocurrency world. As I said earlier in Malta in particular has been an explosion in crypto companies moving headquarters here due to the governments heavy investment and policy making in the sphere. Some states in the US are now considering or already accepting cryptocurrency for paying taxes, while laws regarding declaring & handling cryptocurrency has bought it some much needed legitimacy when it comes to use of it, both in the UK and elsewhere.
As well as this, major banks & financial institutions are now using technology like Ripple to test the waters with using it to replace the aging, black box, badly documented frankenstein systems underpinning our current financial infrastructure.

Quote:

And this was true only for BTC, because all the other coins didn't suffer not a 100th of that

I think you'll find that post-Litecoin, generally the crypto with the 2nd largest cap has shadowed BTC's movements quite closely just obviously at a smaller scale. This could be seen through much of ETHs life.

Quote:

d) and even in you consider the technology behind cryptos, ALMOST ALL ENTERPRISES ARE CONSTRUCTING AND DESIGNING THEIR OWN COINS. So current technology may die in a short period of time.

Often the cryptocurrency market moves as a whole; A reduction in the market cap of Bitcoin will see crypto generally traded for it see a similar reduction at least. While there are likely hundreds to thousands of crypto's out there nowadays I think it's safe to say that the few that continually evolve and are deploying genuinely progressive technology over time will stick around in some capacity. But yep, many governments would also like to create their own national cryptocurrency to improve the efficiency of their financial systems and I think many would still consider this a big step forward in achieving the actual goals of cryptocurrency regardless of its impacts on the grandfather coins.

Quote:

e) cryptos could not even accomplish the idea of fast transactions, and this is why all around the world crypto is losing more and more support day after day.

I think you should look into Bitcoin Lightning, which is hitting major milestones on usage despite BTCs price drop.Quote

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